Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

went back to college having identified two critical things that some people take a lifetime to figure out—who I was and what I wanted to be. Now I had to figure out how to deliver on the latter. The monkey was off my back and I was out and free, but I had turned a corner smack into a new, chilling reality—AIDS.

Along with every other gay man in 1988, I was convinced I would become infected. I filled the empty bin in the back of my head that used to house all my coming-out fears with my updated paranoia, and I equated every ailment with the one I feared the most. I stared at all my bruises, sores, and blemishes, convincing myself that I was going to die. I was too scared to get tested because I thought it simply meant finding out that I had the disease. I didn’t talk to anybody about AIDS; my friends were just coming to terms with the new me and I wanted to project an image of calm, of health.

Watching Oprah and All My Children every day after class provided refuge from my fears. Even when I thought I didn’t care about Oprah’s topic, she had a way of making the show great. Nobody else could do that. And my hair was huge, almost as big as Oprah’s.

Just before senior year, I finally told Graciela that I was gay. I’d saved her for last for some reason. I guess I felt like if I was going to be with a woman, it would’ve been her, and to eliminate this possibility by admitting I was gay meant I was breaking both our hearts. One day at Amanda’s parents’ house, while looking at her painted toenails, she asked me if I liked girls with painted toenails. Amanda and I gave each other a long look.

“I’m gay.”

“Oh, okay,” Grac said matter-of-factly. “I have to make a phone call.” She disappeared inside the house. Amanda and I sat in disbelief, thinking she was in serious denial. Grac said later that she’d been worried how she appeared in front of us, and, like Dave, felt left out of my circle of trust. We barely spoke of it all day, and that night we saw Do the Right Thing. The next day we talked for hours and went deep, agreeing that if I were straight we probably would’ve wound up together. It was all very melancholy.

We recovered by reframing our friendship, becoming even closer. We were partners in crime and on the dance floor, where we always came together. We went to several B-52s concerts that year and danced our butts off. That year Grac had the best college job of all time: She was a moderator on a “Big & Beautiful” chat line, for people who are big and the people who love them. Sometimes the conversation got really dirty, and she had to jump in and tell them to clean it up. But mostly she just let them talk dirty, because she believed that fat people had a right to enjoy themselves. I agreed.

My job through college was running a pushcart at Faneuil Hall—the prototype for renovated urban outdoor malls—in downtown Boston. I sold Deadhead gear, Mexican blankets, Baja pullovers, and little woven bracelets. I was always broke in college—I have no clue what I spent my money on but I had none—so I took a lot of shifts and would just sit in my high director’s chair and listen to Tracy Chapman and the Dead and read No One Here Gets Out Alive and hypothesize about whether Jim Morrison was really dead. My best day was when Lisa Whelchel (“Blair” from Facts of Life) showed up in the mall and I ditched the pushcart for about an hour to follow her around at a respectful distance. Essentially my job consisted of watching idiots walking into each other all day (spend a day watching tourists and you’ll see that they really do become herdlike and walk right into each other) and endlessly answering two questions:

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“How do I get to Cheers?”

Occasionally I would make sure that people knew that when they went to Cheers—by the way it’s not even called that, it’s called the Bull and Finch Pub, and it doesn’t look a thing like the set of the damn show—they would not be seeing Sam and Diane. The irony is that I would’ve been one of those people if I was visiting Boston for a weekend. But I wasn’t, was I?

My other job during college was as a waiter at a restaurant on Boylston Street. The job of waiter may have been created especially for me. I loved talking to strangers and getting them drunk and then getting tipped for it. Sadly, I got fired—for the one and only time in my life—for accepting a “shift drink” after closing time. Every waiter was entitled to one free drink, but the glitch was that I was not twenty-one years old. Maybe that’s why I drink on my show now.

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All my obsessing over my imminent death led me to finally go get an AIDS test at the end of my senior year. After many sleepless nights, with a backdrop of intense buildup and drama, Jackie came with me to get the news. And I was negative. I felt like I could do anything. Finally, I felt I had the opportunity to live a full life. Now I knew I had to strive to enjoy life, take opportunities, follow my dreams, showcase my worth.

That meant moving to New York after graduation and getting a job as a waiter until something opened up at CBS. I didn’t even have to get the waitering job—CBS hired me as a newsclerk on CBS This Morning before I had a chance to unpack my bags.

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Newsclerk—I hated the sound of it. The “clerk” part was what bugged me. But then again, look what I was doing: I answered phones, ripped scripts,